Much has been said about the disconnect between people and their food, but relatively little has been said about the disconnect between people and their wine. I hadn’t really given much thought to the matter myself—it’s much easier to drink than to think—until recently. I told a friend I was heading to Napa to help crush grapes. She asked, “With your feet?”
I knew the image she had in her head, because a similar one popped into mine. Two women, holding up white, canvas dresses, smiling as they danced barefoot over clusters of fruit. I tried to imagine how long it would take us to crush a ton of grapes by foot. Hours? Days? Weeks? Maybe women in the old country had this kind of time, but I had to be back at work on Monday.
Despite some consumers’ quaint notions, the crushing process has greatly evolved in winemakingland. Large wineries, like most industrial processing facilities, have high-tech computerized systems for crushing grapes. Showing up for work barefoot might get you fired. Even at my family’s small winery Tulocay—where we have none of the computers and plenty of antique equipment—time has moved on. We have the wheel. We have fire and electricity. We have a machine called a crusher.
For as basic as the winemaking process is—mix yeast with grape juice and ferment—things have gotten a little more complex. There are genetically modified strains of yeast. There are $1,000 French Oak barrels. There are stainless steel crushers and bladder presses. It’s not that you necessarily need all the fancy equipment—fermentation knows not foot from machine—but modernism make things go a lot faster.
More important than the equipment, however, is the grapes. My dad buys his fruit from a small vineyard down the road, and when I arrived at the winery for crush, on a cool, clear morning in late September, the grapes had already been delivered. Fernando, the vineyard manager, informed me that they start picking well before dawn, headlamps lighting their way through rows of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
Before we could break grape, I sifted through the large, white grape bins removing MOG, or Material Other Than Grape. Because machines do most of the grape harvesting, many extra items—twigs, vines, leaves, bugs—can end up in the hopper.
I took this sifting opportunity to sample some of the fruit. As a kid, wine grapes consistently disappointed me: they were much smaller than the ones from a grocery store, and their seed seemed to take up over half the flesh. When I’d inadvertently crush the seed between my teeth, a slew of bitter tasting tannins would be released in my mouth, ensuring I wouldn’t go reaching for another sample. But tasting them now is a different experience. The flavor is sweet and complex, and much less tart than traditional grapes. Packed in tight clusters, each grape tastes a little different from its neighbor and each bunch, depending on how much sun exposure or leaf cover it had, tastes different from the next.
We had two varietals to crush that day, Chardonnay, a white grape, and Pinot Noir, a red. The flesh of both white and red grapes is white; it is the red skin that gives red wine its color. Because of this, white wine is pressed only, which squeezes the juice from the fruit, but leaves the skins, stems, and most of the seeds behind. Red wine, on the other hand, is crushed first, which keeps the color imparting skins in contact with the juice, and pressed later.
First up was the Chardonnay. My dad operated the forklift, while Jeff, the winemaker, pitched grapes into the wooden cylindrical press. After all the grapes were in, the press was closed up and turned on. The plates at the end of the cylinder moved together, gently crushing the grapes in the middle. This causes the juice to flow out slats in the bottom, and into a vat below, where it is collected and pumped into a large stainless steel tank.
Pressing is a slow process and requires a bit of finesse: you don’t want to press the grapes too much, or else you’ll crush the seeds and release tannins, making the juice bitter. However, you do want a bit of the tannic flavor, which can add some depth and complexity to the otherwise sweet juice.
As the press began its inward spiral, we sampled the effluence. It was sweet, and I was instructed to look for notes of melon and honeysuckle. Just like when I’m tasting wine, the nouns and adjectives used to describe the wine by the label or by the expert are never the ones I would’ve come up with by myself, but given the verbal beating over the head, I start to say—ah-hah!—and taste those very flavors. Melon … yes. Honeysuckle … why, of course.
As more grapes and seeds were crushed, the color of the juice became darker and the flavors more developed.
“Can you taste the cinnamon? That’s the tannins,” asked Jeff.
My tongue swirled around my mouth looking for cinnamon. None was to be found, though the mouth feel did begin to change. It was thicker, and made me pucker a bit. Closer together the plates moved, and the color of the juice began to look like unfiltered apple juice. The flavor picked up hints of apple as well, something I could immediately identify.
It was around noon when we finished the Chardonnay and switched to the Pinot Noir. The press was moved to make room for the crusher, a stainless steel contraption that, with a corkscrew like motion, separates stems from seeds, skins, and juice, all of which are pumped into a stainless steel tank.
While I pitch forked stems into the back of the winery truck, I wondered what the three visitors (who spent most of the day drinking wine on the patio) thought of the whole process. For the uninitiated, it can be an assault on the senses. There was the loud grind of the crusher, and the forklift cranking up bins of Pinot into the hopper. There was the strong, sweet smell of crushed fruit, which intensified as the sun rose higher. There was Gary, a local winery worker, driving the beat up truck to the pasture to dump the stems, while the yellow jackets, a constant fixture in Napa during crush time, swarmed around everything that grape juice had touched. Lucky, the winery cat, had climbed into one of the visitors laps, and a few wild turkeys strutted around the driveway.
Had they come expecting a quiet foot stomping, a human propelled transformation of fruit to drink?
They had not, but their disconnect to the wine making process remained.
As I pulled a seed off my sweaty brow, the visitors, perhaps because they were three bottles of wine under, seemed starry eyed.
“This has been a great experience. Crushing looks like so much fun.”
Photo: dumping Chardonnay grapes into the press, courtesy of the author